While I can agree that the perspective is a bit protectionist, that would not pan out that way. Generally speaking, improving wages overall is either not going to happen, or happen because of inflation. While very rarely is something a zero sum game in economics, it also is the case that it doesn't at least somewhat behave like a zero sum situation. It's not necessarily a bad thing for society in general, but one should not pretend for a second that such moves would magically enable everyone to get six-figure standard of living.

Though I'm not usually dealing with Microsoft platforms, I have enough experience with it to consider classifying it as 'legacy' in any sort of universal way an odd proposition. It is after all *the* first-party supported development framework for Microsoft platforms, very much continuing to be supported and developed by a pretty important market force (like it or not).

Of course 'Legacy' is mostly in the eye of the beholder. About the only place 'Legacy' seems to have unambiguous meaning is within a single development organization replacing/phasing out projects they control. COBOL continues to see pretty significant deployments and is actively being enhanced, though most people in the industry would consider that 'Legacy'. Similar story for Fortran. A number of languages that don't get so much 'glory' these days continue to play important roles in particular segments and continue to be developed. There are those that would consider PHP 'legacy' and others just moving onto the platform. If you try to name a platform that by popular opinion is almost certainly totally 'Legacy' you'll probably discover not only some groups doing new development in the language, but some companies or projects actually continuing to enhance the language for others. Basically, if you can remember it, it by some definition is probably still alive.

To say it's 'export controlled' is an oversimplification of the restrictions around working with those nations.

But in simple terms, this is about *contributors*, not downloading. And if it weren't an issue, then Fedora people wouldn't be trying to game it for plausible deniability (which of course doesn't work when you say "Hey everyone, I want to be able to claim plausible deniability so could you just omit some information so I can do that?"

While I agree that a government is almost certainly not behind this and thoughts that it is are people thinking a bit too much of BitCoin. That said, hypothetically I could see why a government would choose an underhanded way to bring down something like this compared to overt regulation.

Consider that bitcoin is in no small part driven by people fanatically thinking fiat currency is the devil (for some very literally calling the dollar the mark of the beast) and that gold standard or something like that is 'the' answer to all that ails any economy. Explicitly banning it bears the risk of inducing the supporters to say 'see, told you so!' (even though there are very practical reasons to not let it get carried away, the reasons are sufficiently complicated and nuanced that it would be hard to simply explain).

Of course, knowing precisely why an unregulated currency of this nature is a bad idea would leave the opportunity for a government to cause it to collapse by exploiting those flaws. Most likely the flaws are just naturally being exploited because you don't have to give crooks a big reason to be crooks, but it is a strategy that might be more effective than blanket laws.

Why not? That is *precisely* what wolfram did here. He designed the 'language' and decided 'gee it would be nice to have a first class function for travelling salesman', and then when he goes to demo, he whips that out to say 'look at this obscure capability omitted from most languages'. This may be useful, but being excited around the linecount is not something compelling in this case, as it shows no particularly exciting grammer/syntax stuff, just that Wolfram deemed 'travelling salesman' a problem worthy of being a first class function in the namespace.

Pretty much anyone can submit an IETF RFC if they really want. The existence of a draft does not guarantee a ratified version will exist someday.

For another, it could be much worse. There is explicit wording at least here about seeking consent from the user and allowing opt-out even in the 'captive' case, as well as notifying the actual webserver of this intermediary, and that the intermediary must use a particular keyusage field meaning that some trusted CA has explicitly approved it (of course, the CA model is pretty horribly ill-suited for internet scale security, but better than nothing). Remember how Nokia confessed they silently and without consent had their mobile browser hijack and proxy https traffic without explicitly telling the user or server? While something like this being formalized wouldn't prevent such a trick, it would be very hard to defend a secretive approach in the face of this sort of standard being in the wild.

Keep in mind that in a large number of cases in mobile, the carriers are handing people the device including the browser they'll be using. A carrier could do what Nokia admits to in many cases without the user being the wiser and claim the secretive aspect is just a side effect today. If there was a standard clearly laying out that a carrier or mobile manufacturer should behave a certain way, that defense would go away.

I would always elect the 'opt out' myself, but I'd prefer anything seeking to proxy secure traffic be steered toward doing things on the up and up rather than pretending no one will do it and leaving the door open for ambiguous intentions.

Even if it did need to have something like IR cameras to observe IR leds in the headset (or vice-versa, as the Wii did), I don't think it would be too bad.

They have gyroscopic in there already. That's how they can do yaw and such. Still does nothing to help you with linear movement.

Granted, but then again, a lot of particular prominent, even more special purpose successes require a pretty big commitment. Rock band did well and no one is going to claim it's trivial to whip out the guitars and drumset. Granted their success did not endure, but primarily because the experience lacked sufficient variety, it did show people were committed to go through some hoops. Similarly, *really* sitting down to enjoy a feature length movie requires some commitment (doing so without commitment is possible, but much less enjoyable.

And there weren't many games that supported accelerated 3D graphics when 3dfx voodoo came out. Being too discouraged by that leads to a chicken and egg situation. It's probably also off putting that the set of available titles are at best adaptations of existing games or very basic things. The reason being that the quality games take longer and as such are still in progress (Star Citizen is one I'm really looking forward to). Crystal Cove demonstrates they will have capabilities the dev kits aren't even equipped to help publishers prepare for yet. Oculus is doing the only thing that might have a chance, building up a lot of excitement and coming in at an approachable price point to try to break the chicken and egg situation.

This is one area that has me pretty worried and waiting (that and the availability of good positional sensing). I'm really hoping they will be able to use at least a 2560x1440 OLED display (thanks to the mobile resolution pissing contest, Samsung looks ready to announce a shipping product with 2560x1440 at 5.2", 560 ppi seems very promising to construct a display out of, even if magnified).

Very, very rarely is gaming remotely entertaining to mere observers. A lot of very popular things are *always* equally anti-social (texting, reading books, listening to music on headphones, pretty much doing *anything* on a smartphone or even tablet, laptop, or computer).

The same can be true of racing or flying games, but that doesn't stop the vast majority of people making do with simpler controls. Just because you *can* take things very far at a very high price, doesn't mean you have to. The external tracking of the head is going to be baked into the headset cost (and not that expensive, as Kinect has shown) Headphones are straightforward as is positional audio in the headphone situation. Beyond eyewear and headphones, things get optional pretty fast. Wiimote-grade tracking for hands I certainly see as a big value add, but things start falling off real fast beyond that (the treadmill I'm skeptical would do anything to pull me that much more in as I think it would still feel very very off, but would wear me out greatly).

They have accelerators in the headset. It doesn't do much good when at times the head can move at constant velocity. For sensing gravity and rotational movement, it works well, but translation movement is impossible to do reliably with accelerators lacking any sort of frame of reference.

I think the really difficult thing to overcome is when there truly is a labor surplus. Still a need for labor and particularly like you say, labor that not enough people 'just want' to do and particularly jobs almost anyone could do given a near trivial amount of training, but not enough demand to keep everyone meaningfully occupied.

Say hypothetically you are facing a situation that would mean massive unemployment, but realistically you could feed, clothe, shelter, and provide health care for everyone. But you still need people like delivery drivers. So either you provide all the fundamental needs for the unemployed and have a hard time finding people to do delivery work, or you resign society to screwing over the unemployed.

Of course, I think a key flaw that leads to this situation is the bad assumption that the choices are either 40 hours of work/week or 0 hours of work/week. A less ambitious goal might be to have more people working but for fewer hours. At least in the US, the stack is very heavily stacked against this evolution. The current healthcare situation is the worst of both worlds. When they first started talking health care reform, I imagined foolishly that we would be put on a path where one's employer did not have anything to do with coverage. Instead, it doubles down on that and as a result people are getting fewer hours, but without the health care. For such a goal to move forward, the 'magic' around 40 hrs/week has to go away.

While I agree there is more to motivation than money, that statement is just simply wrong. There was one dubious study that claimed that $75k maxed out 'happiness'. People still fret about acquiring compensation to put to some personal use well beyond $75k. Maybe somewhere up in the millions of dollars the dollar amount becomes more of a 'high score' than something to exchange for goods/services, but it's definitely not at $70k.

In all fairness, the same can apply to a loan. If you are in a country whose laws do not recognize your liability to your previous government, they likely don't recognize your liability for the loan. I think that the list of nations where that would work is pretty short and many of which are not exactly places you'd want to be.

While I am not sure how I feel about such a thought, he does present an interesting perspective. University in many cases presents a conflict of interest. An aspect of university is to prove to other people how capable a person is, but said person is the source of income to the university, so they have to walk a fine line between pandering too much to paying students and diluting the value of issued degrees and driving away sources of funding. If the University is instead funded based on the aggregate success of their graduates, it presents a very different motivation scheme.

Of course, that scheme might not pan out so well for liberal arts, where financially the result is likely not to be favorable.

I think the delta because of lunar eclipses counts in the 'about' neighborhood.

Those aren't extra, they come with windows.

Actually, Windows comes with servicable grep equivalent out of the box, but that's not really the use case I care most about.

*EVERYTHING* for the last several decades can translate ASCII to a human consumable form. That's pretty damn significant to ignore.

My point was being too aggressive about switching between technologies adds a lot of complexity to trying do support a mixed environment.

CentOS 6 is the *current* version. If you install CentOS *today* that's what you get.